From the rosy nostalgia and/or existential meltdown courtesy of algorithmic reminders of decade-old events, to general misanthropic rage and a pining for something more straightforward amid the clutter. ‘Don’t want a lot in life, just some kitchen scissors that actually work,’ Johnson sings, ‘don’t want a lot in life, just to learn to be more like Picard than Kirk.’

The song was taken from the EP, Dress Well Enough, which has now been released via Very Jazzed. Consisting of three songs, the EP confronts perceived character defects, with each track focusing on a flaw. With its collection of irritations and burning frustration, ‘T.O.C.’ concentrated on short-temperedness, while the title track turns its attentions to self-consciousness. With a characteristically rich and upbeat style, the song explores the misleading and exhausting business of cultivating a persona through exterior surfaces, and how people are often not what they seem upon first impression.

“In my experience, nobody really knows what they’re doing” Johnson explains, “but if they dress the part and convince everyone else that they do, then they’ll start to believe it themselves.” A process doubly taxing—intended not only to convince strangers but oneself too. “Personally, my confidence (or a lack thereof) often comes as a result of other people’s perceptions of me,” he continues. “This song is about that, and the way that we all do our best to maintain a certain level of control over how we are perceived by others.”

Final track ‘Tying Knots’ concentrates, or perhaps doesn’t, on inattentiveness. A drifting, regretful track of lost focus, where the cloudiness comes to mimic the sliding attention of the lyrics. One which finds Why Dogs Why at its most melancholic, weighed down by the textures of the track, and Bijan Eghtesady’s drums never quite shaking free of the gauzy shroud.

I heard a sound that wasn’t me –
all focus lost eternally.
I thought a lot about defeat.
I guess I’ll go to bed early,
without me

Dress Well Enough is out now via Very Jazzed and you can grab it from the Why Dogs Why Bandcamp page.

Album artwork by Sam Mitchell, with additional edits by Ian Joslin

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But within the sublime climax of the single, another dimension showed its face. Because when the end of the world is so intrinsically linked to the greed and violence of the world itself, the process is far from simple. The terror of the destruction is balanced by other forces. Not only a wry sense of justice, but a sense of possibility, an opportunity to start anew. The razing power of fire making space for new ways of living to take hold.

Brushfire emerges from within this spirit, though is far from one-dimensional in its focus. Rather, G. Brenner weaves the various threads of his life into the fabric of the record, from the loss of his mother (captured on ‘Moon Landing’) to themes of identity, queer kinship and gender fluidity explored on the likes of ‘Dee Dee’. These personal themes are interconnected just as in the lived experience, and when charted against the huge weight the various global disasters and struggles, lend a nuanced human spirit to something that can otherwise be so huge as to be rendered simplistic.

As with much of G. Brenner’s work (including that as Pastel), a large proportion of these themes are rooted in trauma. Short- and long-term. The grief, the panic, the shock. The long mourning of life as it could have been lived, if only things were different. But for all of the anxiety and sadness, Brushfire is not a fatalistic record. It’s too rooted in the experience for that. As though pessimism is a form of self-indulgence. Doom just another luxury of those with time to sit and think, or with something material to lose. These are songs view what is coming with trepidation, yes, but with some persistent hope that there is some better place beyond. “Over my head / I hear music in the air,” goes closing track ‘Spirit’, “there must be a God somewhere.”

We had the opportunity to ask Brenner a few questions about the record, and dig a little deeper into the themes which underpin it. Read on below for an insight into making connections, flaming McMansions and the enduring tendency to persist.

Hi Gabriel, thanks so much for speaking with us. How does it feel to be so close to releasing Brushfire into the world?

Hello! Thank *you* for speaking with me <3 I think the feeling I harbor the most right now is relief. I’ve sat on this record for so long, about 3 years, and it really felt like I still had to hold all the anxiety and grief and fear and exhaustion that went into the album through the release rollout. To release the album into the world is in some ways to pass all of those ideas and feelings onto someone else (should they decide to listen). They are no longer just mine to hold onto because they become stories for other people to parse through and live in and make meaning out of. In that way, I feel a sense of relief because I don’t really have to live in my head with all of it so much anymore. I’m excited to see the response to a longer work of mine, too. As Pastel, I only ever released short EPs, so I really wanted to make a thorough artistic statement and not just a pocket sized release.

To say this is an ambitious album is something of an understatement, the themes ranging from colonialism and climate disaster to meditations on identity and the queer experience. Did it prove difficult to layer such profound topics into the songs? Or are they so intrinsic to one another that such delineations are moot?

I think figuring out the language around each idea individually was the difficult part. My overall modality of writing changed in the process of this album, from very inward-delving to a much more outward gaze – towards the world instead of away from it. I had to craft a new artistic language for myself to compensate for the shift in ideas and interest. I still found that the most potent way to generate that new language was to start from a personal place and then branch outward away from myself, so perhaps my writing style became more about the process of that shift in perspective and less the result of it, if that makes sense.

I found myself letting small bits of lyrics or outlines for ideas sit for quite a while before I tried to flesh them out. I knew a lot of the ideas felt a little disparate on paper, but I knew their connections were intrinsic, so I let time work its magic and reveal the connections between them. This gave a lot of space for inspiration to trickle in from the periphery, too. As time went on, each idea just became more and more multifaceted, and their circles of reach stretched wider and wider, to the point that the seemingly disparate lyrical ideas started to overlap naturally.

Apocalyptic imagery is prominent across the record, though it is more complicated than plain old anxiety and dread. Tracks like ‘Mudslide’ introduce a conflicted state, and it soon becomes apparent this feeling is stitched into the very fabric of the album. Because while such destruction is violent and terrible, it also suggests new possibilities. Some sublime beauty in the violence. As though total collapse might be the only way to conquer the hegemonic forces that be. Could you speak a little on the balance between terror and awe on the record?

It’s very much a consequence of living in California and being subjected to constant wildfires. Total collapse often feels right around the corner, and in some ways you almost cannot avoid the awe of being confronted with your own precarity so often. There was a long period of time in the process of this album where I was essentially unemployed, and so I spent a lot of that time watching local news. Most of the news stories during that period were live coverage of massive, destructive wildfires. As is often the case, many of them took place in the hilly areas of southern California, where a lot of wealth is concentrated. I would constantly consume images of these massive houses burning down, likely million to multi-million dollar homes. On one hand, it was hard to deny an impending sense of doom, because those hills weren’t too far from where I lived. The chances of the flames moving down the hills and into the flat suburban area I called home at the time were slim, but the chance was still there.

On the other hand, it was like watching symbols of all that is antithetical to my being be destroyed in real time. All that wealth, whiteness, heteronormativity, quite literally looming over the rest of the city from up on the hills – poof! Gone. Direct action from Mother Nature herself. I don’t think total environmental collapse is a valid way to conquer hegemonic forces by any stretch, because almost universally it will affect marginalized peoples the worst. But when it’s a McMansion burning down in the hills… Let’s just say it doesn’t stir the same terror in me that it would if it happened to someone else.

Following the thought further, how would you judge the outlook of the songs? I can’t help but find some persistent spirit. Not hope exactly, or anything like a certain future, but some chink in the encroaching doom. Is this a shred of optimism shining? Or just a fatalistic thrill in the chaos?

I would definitely call it hope myself! I think it’s hard to call it hope when the future perhaps seems terrifyingly more certain as each day passes (shoutout to the recent IPCC report), but it’s defeatist to be so fatalistic, even though I do have to fight that tendency towards fatalism in myself.

I think dealing with the grief of my mother’s passing really put a lot of things into perspective. It quite literally felt like my world was falling apart on a personal level when she passed. My mother was supporting me big time while I was finding my footing after graduating from art school. Finding a job after it ended was immensely difficult, so she let me stay with her until I figured everything out. I ended up working part-time for minimum wage at Target for almost a year, and I had just gone back to school to start pursuing music more seriously, as I have very minimal and sporadic formal training. It was very tough, but I really started to feel like I was finding some sort of passionate path forward with the classical voice program I was in. When she passed away, all that went by the wayside. I had to abandon music school and get a Real Adult Job and grieve with the little time I had to myself. It wasn’t the path forward I was anticipating, but it was ultimately forward. Thankfully I was able to find the time, energy, and desire to funnel that grief into music-making.

I guess this is a long-winded, personal way of saying that it’s impossible to truly anticipate what may come next. If total collapse is what ends up happening, it is not an end, for better or for worse. Forward continues to happen, and I am certain that we will find ways to resist what seems ever-more certain and persist.

There’s a strong visual element to Brushfire, from the accompanying artwork to a series of striking videos released in the build-up to the album. How important is this side of the work? And how did the collaborations for the videos come about?

The visual side of my releases are always super important to me. My first love was visual art, so I always strive to present a holistic work where the audio and visual portions are very much in conversation and lend to each other’s meanings. A lot of people also refer to my music as cinematic, to the point where my label and I have played with calling my music “cinepop,” so it only feels right to have a visual side that’s equally as illustrative as the music.

Amara Higuera, my visual collaborator for this album, is a very good friend of mine. We were roommates for 2 years in undergrad, so we’re very familiar with each other’s visual styles. When it came time to work on visuals, I knew she was who I wanted to work with. She also told me that she wanted to make music videos with me since the moment we met, which was really touching. The collaboration process felt very natural. It often felt like she’d finish my visual sentences before I even had the words to communicate them. She knows me better than I know myself, visually and otherwise, and I don’t think the visuals would have been right had I worked with anyone else.

Finally, it’s a record of many emotions, with tracks like ‘Moon Landing’ and ‘Dee Dee’ capturing a marbled blend of fear and joy and mourning and love and lots of other things too. Does any of one feeling rise to the top when you think of the album now it’s complete and finished? What do you think is going to be your lasting impression of Brushfire?

On a personal level, no single feeling rises to the top just yet. I think I’ll have to get a little more distance from the rollout process and see how people respond to the music for a bit before that happens. The one thing that has stayed in my mind through this whole process though is the extent to which my music can have an effect on people. A lot of people I’ve shown the album have said it brought them to tears or moved them in a way they hadn’t been moved before, which is both an immense honor and a lot of pressure for the work I make in the future. If I do have the ability to deeply influence someone’s inner world, it’s something I’ll have to really foster and nurture and ensure it’s influencing the people that listen to my music in a way that’s ultimately positive for them. It’s one of the worries I did have about this album. There is so much (warranted) dread throughout, but I am optimistic that the little embers of hope that pop up along the way are just as impactful as all the tougher emotions.

Brushfire is out now via Very Jazzed and available from the G. Brenner Bandcamp page.

Photos by Amara Higuera

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Today sees the release of brand new single, ‘Dee Dee’. A reflection on a late professor, the song once again homes in on death as a central theme, but also serves as a further exploration into the lessons the lost person taught, and the value they offered on earth. Layers of ambient textures welcome sentiments into life, the pervading sense of loss joined by themes of gender fluidity and queer kinship, and the idea of mourning as an expression of gratitude. “You were a dancer / Never settled into / One form,” Brenner sings. “You taught of / Bodies like ours / And the violence / To tether us to Two poles.”

But true to G. Brenner’s style, larger forces intervene. Some pulse emerges within the barely shifting ambient style, slowly drawing Brenner away from the confines of the body into the nameless movement of a crowd. Soon the track develops into full blown techno, a nocturnal sound of heat and flash and movement which positions the dance floor as what Brenner calls “a sacred site where queer pasts, presents, and futures collapse.”

The tragedy of the track is how this disconnection is never complete. The past does not collapse, not fully. Brenner is never able to fully lose himself amid the bodies, anchored to his own by loss and trauma. So even as the beat rises, his plaintive voice returns once more. Calling on Dee Dee to visit or watch over. To guide him through the dark.

Do you dance with me now, Dee Dee?
Feel the pulse in me now, Dee Dee
Guide me now, Dee Dee
It’s so bleak now, Dee Dee

‘Dee Dee’ is accompanied by a video directed by LA-based artist Amara Higuera Hopping, with choreography from Canadian choreographer and dance artist Alexsa Durrans. Performers include Brenner himself, alongside New Kjochakorn Ngamnimmitthum, Marina Brenner, Hugo Cervantes-Flores, Annakai Hayakawa Geshlider, Dylan Karlsson, Brittany Ko and Sai Tripathi.

‘Dee Dee’ is out now and available via the G. Brenner Bandcamp page, including a lathe-cut 7″ edition. Brushfire is out on the 20th August and you can pre-order it now.

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Now recording as G. Brenner, this summer sees Brenner once again team up with Very Jazzed for a brand new album, Brushfire, and today sees the release of a lead single of the same name. Described as the “thesis statement” of the album, the track emerges quietly, a soft hymn supported by nothing but subtle ambient textures. But stark keys emerge, then an insidious shimmer and glitch, and with them the realisation of the coalescing dread. “Santa Ana’s racing through my yard,” Brenner sings. “Watching homes turn into flames / Wonder if my body’s burning up / In a room I lay awake.” What had passed for peace is revealed to be anything but, the fatalist’s brief serenity before the final fall. Brenner sits in California, and California is on fire.

Yet as the ashes fill his lungs and his ribs disintegrate, something emerges. Call it a vision, a dream. An alternate space and time where things are different, and human needs might be met. A place where all that America denies and destroys might be allowed to breathe, where the air itself is not alight. The soaring moment is interrupted by the flames at the door. The intense and cruel present leaving no time for imagination.

Such a realisation is central to ‘Brushfire’. The peculiar sadness of a present so immediate it prevents us from envisioning a future. A grief so strong it registers even as the flames rise and the air turns to soot. The sensation is palpable in Brenner’s final lines, the words giving way to silence before a radio sample rises in the background. A voice quick and desperate, stripped down to sheer reportage in the face of a violence so complete it almost becomes sublime.

The song is accompanied by a video, which Brenner co-directed with co-directed with Amara Higuera Hopping.

Photos by Amara Higuera Hopping, artwork by Hopping and Gabriel Brenner

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A series of singles and covers have followed, taking on everything from Martian horses to the dread of self-diagnosing via the internet. The singles game looks to amp up further this year, through what is being tentatively labelled the ‘Why Dogs Why 2021 World Takeover’ with the good folks at Very Jazzed. The first song to see light of day, ‘T.O.C.’ sees Bijan Eghtesady join on drums for what is another distinctive balance between sardonic wit and sincere emotion.

Kicking out of a hazy, easy-going rhythm, the song is a what Johnson describes as a confrontation of “the many feelings one is presented with upon logging on to various social media platforms first thing in the morning.” All of the familiar offenders are present, from the rosy nostalgia and/or existential meltdown courtesy of algorithmic reminders of decade-old events, to general misanthropic rage and a pining for something more straightforward amid the clutter. “Don’t want a lot in life, just some kitchen scissors that actually work,” Johnson sings, “don’t want a lot in life, just to learn to be more like Picard than Kirk.”

Artwork by sammala and Small Factory

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The release marked Pastel as a project with a uniquely ambitious vision, more an extension of Brenner’s artwork than musical side project. Through vocals, textures and tones, not to mention silence itself, Brenner conjures soundscapes that move beyond the traditional song, operating with higher intentions. But to cast the style in such a light is to risk suggesting that Pastel is some dense and inaccessible experiment in metaphor, when in reality it is intuitive and heartfelt. Released in 2018, standalone single ‘Close‘ put the idea to bed, “refocusing on a rich pop sound that would be at home amongst the chart toppers,” as we wrote at the time.

Today, Pastel unveils a brand new single, ‘Moon Landing’, a song which solidifies Brenner’s ability to weave stark violence and warm emotion into a single sound. The first look at his forthcoming debut LP, the track is an extremely personal examination of loss and grief, as well as the love that underpins such emotions. His mother dying of cancer, the song finds Brenner at her side, unable to help or intervene in the slow creep of time as the seconds pass away. As the title suggests, the image is compared to that of a rocket launch, a departure from one world to another, all locked in on an unalterable schedule. “Feel her counting down an ending,” Brenner sings, the intensity of his words rising, “’til there’s liftoff.”

Emerging from wind-based field recordings and gently picked acoustic guitar from Warren Hildebrand of Foxes in Fiction, the song proceeds with a haunting hesitancy, Brenner’s vocals warbling across the quiet. The aforementioned liftoff triggers an abrupt change, the background noise growing harsh and pressing as the keys arpeggiate, a loss of control as the processes kick into wild motion. The finale of the track simmers down once more, the furious action passed but still visible in great contrails across the sky.

The artwork for the single features an image of the Challenger disaster in 1986, which broke up seventy-three seconds after launch. The event was broadcast live on TV, a presenter counting down as the camera focuses on the waiting shuttle, strapped onto the launch pad, waiting to go. And go it did, arcing upwards in silent motion before disintegrating into a sublime plume of sparks and smoke, the gathered audience left with no other option than to watch the awesome spectacle.

The remains of the crew were retrieved by marine salvage crews several weeks later, and the fact that those who were destined to experience life beyond earth ended up on the ocean floor changed the American view of space exploration for decades. But with ‘Moon Landing’, Pastel rewrites the story of the Challenger, or else reframes the course of those aboard. Every space shuttle sheds components as it rises, and Brenner takes the physical body as just another component. Death not as some spectacular return to earth but the final unburdening, every physical weight left behind for the final ascension, the spirit eventually able to turn back and look down upon our blue and brilliant world.

Gently landing on the surface
Her legs are dangling
From the crater

Is it different from above?
Are you ever really resting?

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Next came the Blue Jay EP, which “further blur[red] the dividing lines between pop, post-rock and ambient, conjuring a sound that manage[d] to make personal experiences appear vast and weighed with meaning.” The release felt like the Two Meters aesthetic being honed, another step toward realising Costolo’s singular vision that built upon the intimate and emotional style of his debut.

Continuing this development, Two Meters is back with a brand new A/B single, The Nightmare // Bike Ride, again released with Very Jazzed. Produced by Paul Kintzing of German Error Message, the songs find Costolo pushing into dark and foreboding territories. ‘The Nightmare’ opens with a palpable sense of trepidation that calls to mind Jason Molina‘s starkest work. “Alone gasping for air,” Costolo murmurs, “against the weight of the world,” and this weight is soon given tangible form in the shape of thundering guitars.

Indeed, the entirety of the lyrics could be taken as a verbalised summation of what is the heaviest and bleakest Two Meters song to date.

Crushing down as shadows move
Faceless but with form
A mouth unable to cry out
As the darkness comes
Just as fast life snaps back
The figure gone
The room is back in view
What was real is never clear

The heaviest and bleakest, that is, until ‘Bike Ride’ swings into view. Forming out of the static aftermath of the previous track, the song finds a callous rhythm amid the reverb, dragging its great heft forward with a terrible inevitability. “There’s a nail in my wheel,” Costolo wails, his voice half-crazed through the noise. “My pedals are broken / Left to grind / Into my heel.”

In some ways the track serves as an interesting counterpoint to another bicycle-themed track from this year. Pedro The Lion‘s ‘Yellow Bike’ is similarly nostalgic, looking back at what once was, but while Bazan finds something like fondness, gazing at past concerns in the knowledge that he outlasted their threat, Costolo’s discovery is far less comforting. Here the retrospection is far more immediate, the danger still present and waiting. If the closing moments of the track see the nightmare break, then there is still no promise that it cannot return. Maybe the next night, or the night after that, or every night of your life, picking at the wounds it inflicts so that they may never quite heal.

My helmets collecting dust
The brakes are out
I am
Crossing the street

I make it to the other side
But look back and wonder
What could have been

The Nightmare // Bike Ride is out now via Very Jazzed and you can get it from the Two Meters Bandcamp page.

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Today we’re delighted to be able to share the lead single from a brand new Two Meters release, The Blue Jay EP, coming this May on Very Jazzed. Developing the vulnerability and tenderness of EP1, ‘Ground’ sees Costolo further blur the dividing lines between pop, post-rock and ambient, conjuring a sound that manages to make personal experiences appear vast and weighed with meaning.

The opening build has elements of early-career Wintersleep, an ominous creep that threatens to explode into violent crescendo, though in fact the opposite occurs, the track dialling down to a small point. However, the vocals are inversely-related to the instrumentation, progressing from Costolo’s detached mumble into something altogether more impassioned and desperate, his voice joined by another that stretches and strains under the forces of emotion.

The Blue Jay EP will be released via Very Jazzed on the 17th May and you can pre-order it from Bandcamp.

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However, while Pastel opted for a sprawling ambient sound, Two Meters has at least one foot in the bedroom pop camp. Though with the help of Brenner’s production, Costolo maintains a rich and fierce instrumental edge too. As such, Two Meters achieves what at first appears a paradoxical hybrid, blending the sincere intimacy of bedroom pop with the urgent weight of ambient into what are either condensed epics or impossibly rich snapshots. Dimestore Saints, who premiered the first single, put it nicely, describing how Costolo manages to “hon[e] sentiments of loss and sorrow into a precise vessel,” vacuum-packing too-large emotions into a single EP.

As the title suggests, ‘Left Behind’ opens with a headlong charge into the themes of the record,  charting the aftermath of a bereavement. The track is sedate for the first half, though a lingering hum suggests some residual energy, the air still vibrating from the recent violence. This sparks back into full-bodied emotion by the midway point, and in doing so conjures the cycle of the grieving process, anaesthetised stretches interspersed with sudden drops, where everything becomes too vivid and fast-moving.

‘Captive Audience’ is less abrupt, building slowly with simmering tension before the monolithic white noise garble of ‘Current Sequel’ tries to swamp Costolo’s words. From here, ‘Trapped Inside’ clears the air, though in a fashion strangely ethereal, as though peace can only come in dreams, before ‘Web’ follows with warm yet morose pleading. The track could be seen as the first waking moments after the lightness of ‘Trapped Inside’, a desperate desire to go back into the dream or time itself, or else just share words once more with a person who needs to hear them.

We’re delighted to be able to share a full stream of the EP a few days early, especially as the album is one that deserves to be listened to as a complete whole.

Artwork by Maya Tripathi

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